The true monstrosity in TALES FROM THE CRYPT is the decor, with Joan Collins’ suburban house of horrors taking the less-than-ideal home prize.

Joan bludgeons her husband to death with a poker on Christmas Eve, causing him to spurt poster paint onto his Burley Observer, but she’s had the misfortune to do this as another burly observer is on the loose, a hulking escaped lunatic dressed as Santa.

Robert Zemeckis remade this for the TFTC TV series, and his version had a lot of kinetic running about and a certain amount of padding. Freddie Francis directs the original with nicely judged compositions and one genuine shock. Plus the hilarious gag of the blood-soaked bubbles going down the drain, which form the colours of a Santa suit and beard.

Freddie Francis, appearing at the Edinburgh Film Festival some years back (when he was alive), said that in his horror films he had always tried to splash the blood on extravagantly until it got silly, because he didn’t think these things should be taken seriously. Nowadays, the dribbling grue looks positively underdone, apart from its lurid hue.

Suddenly one realizes that the entire visual plan of the movie is riffing, Snow White style, on the Coke-colours of Santa’s costume, and the movie comes to seem far wittier than it had been. The humour is DARK, certainly…

Not an obvious choice for producer Milton Subotsky, one would have thought — a horror producer who disliked gore makes two compendium movies (this and VAULT OF HORROR) based on notoriously bloody American horror comics which had been banned in the UK fifteen years before. But of course they were very successful — following the earlier DR TERROR’S HOUSE OF HORROR they exploited the marquee value of a dozen or so name actors, each of whom only had to do a couple of days’ work.

Unlike most Amicus films, TFTC is a bit depressing, as every story takes place in a world of horrible people and cruelty. The innocents are there to be tormented, until they too turn vicious. It’s disturbing not just because it’s a darker vision of humanity, but because it has more in common with reality than the typical horror world-view of easily-recognized goodies and baddies. The theme is most powerfully illustrated in the Peter Cushing episode. This already has a creepy reality, since Cushing plays a windower and performs to a portrait of his real late wife, who is given her real name, Helen. His character is persecuted to suicide by a nasty neighbour, and Cushing revels in portraying uncomprehending agony. Freddie Francis, who up till now has seemed excited only by gliding his camera elegantly through awful rooms, and jibbing precisely across macro-details, is hypnotized by Cushing, lingering on his suffering face as if suddenly discovering a human connection.

The final episode reprises the dynamic of FREAKS — disabled people take a horrific revenge on a persecutor. Francis was a fan of Whale and Browning, and was disturbed by the fact that many horror fans didn’t know anything about them — they’re interest was purely in horror, in representations of violence. Nigel Patrick being made to run a razor-blade maze in the dark brings the movie’s fascination with horrible furnishings to a crescendo, centering as it does on the creation of one living hell (the unsympathetic asylum for the blind), then another (the maze). Francis pushes in on eyes and razors, a Bunuel by implication.

At the end of the movie, everyone’s in hell, especially Donald Sinden, who didn’t really do anything to deserve it and who didn’t actually die in his episode. You want logic? Go next door, they’re showing Rossellini’s SOCRATES.

OK, a little gentle nudging got me to look at Charles Frend’s unofficial trilogy of WWII sea pictures. When we get to THE CRUEL SEA it’s as good as it’s cracked up to be, so be patient…

First up, THE BIG BLOCKADE (1942) isn’t purely a sea picture, it’s about the economic war on Germany. It’s pure wartime propaganda, Ealing’s bit for the war effort, just over an hour long and a kind of sketch film, written by former Hitchcock collaborator Angus MacPhail. Forced jocularity and British actors playing Germans and Italians and Russians. Historically interesting, of course. The Germans are the baddies — we’re encouraged to laugh as the factory management are threatened with Dachau if they don’t keep up production — the Italians are just a joke. “You violate me in international law!” protests a wop captain. “Wouldn’t dream of it, old boy,” comes the dry response.

Robert Morley as a Nazi is a sight to see. Even more lip-smacking than usual.

The ocean-going bit involves Will Hay, popular British comedian — certainly a better character actor than George Formby or Arthur Askey, so I suppose we should be grateful. But his whole scene is basically a lot of information shoveled down the audience’s throat without enough comedy to make it halfway palatable. In the flying bit we get John Mills and Michael Rennie — Quatermass and Klaatu! — on the same plane. No wonder we won.

I enjoyed the film mainly for the model shots and the sometimes bizarre stunt casting. Nazi Germany as Toyland.

Naval pictures are quite weird animals. They consist on the one hand of miniatures and special effects — the fantasy cinema of Georges Melies where everything is flimsily constructed and presented with a magician’s sleight-of-hand — and on the other hand, of stock footage, actuality material of the real war, with real waves, ships and (implied) death. In between these two extremes are the actors, sometimes on location, sometimes in sets. They have the tricky job of gluing it all together with dramaturgic paste. All Frend’s skills as a former editor are needed to maintain an illusion of cause and effect.

SAN DEMETRIO LONDON (1943) is Ealing Studio’s tribute to the Merchant Marines, with a no-star cast but some favourite character people turning up amid the ensemble, such as Mervyn Johns and a baby-faced Gordon Jackson. Script is by Frend with Robert Hamer and F. Tennyson Jesse, whose novel A Pin to see the Peepshow was Hamer’s dream project as director. The team concoct some amusing banter.

“Nice bit of gun, that.”

“Ah, guns is like women, you never know until you’re in action. And then it’s too late.”

And Hamer’s reputation as a boozer is confirmed by some nicely observed drinking rituals. “Drink?” “At this hour? Thanks.”

The first surprise is when the titular boat is shelled at sea and the crew have to man the lifeboats. One lot endure a rocky couple of nights in an inky ocean which is actually rear-projected in negative. It’s like the coach ride from NOSFERATU, an intersticial realm between filmic dimensions of reality — I suppose they slipped into it owing to that weird gulf between archive footage and miniatures.

The second surprise is when, spotting what they think is a rescue ship, the lifeboat survivors find it’s their own bloody ship again, still ablaze but miraculously unsunk and unexploded. In a gingerly fashion, they get aboard and try to make her shipshape, since another night in the lifeboat seems unsurvivable. So what we have is a tale not of warfare but simple survival. It’s all quite compelling, low-key and restrained in the British tradition. The really touching bit involves the men getting a cash bonus for salvaging their own vessel. Ealing’s love of camaraderie and the common man shine through. In fact, the studio was somewhat socialistic, and Ealing boss Michael Balcon was on a secret committee tasked with preparing the British public for a Labour government after the war. Here, the sailors share in the profits of their toils as we were all supposed to.

SAN DEMETRIO LONDON ends in Scotland, and THE CRUEL SEA (1953) begins there, as Jack Hawkins gets his new vessel and new crew. The immediate dramatic issue becomes Stanley Baker, loudmouthed first mate, a used car salesman in civilian life (the other officers are all respectable middle-class solicitors and copywriters and such). He has to be gotten rid of with what’s either a duodenal ulcer or neurotic malingering. It’s suggested that he wouldn’t have had the mental resilience for war — although two of the remaining men show marked signs of strain later. Baker certainly makes a strong impression, snarling and sneering as if on the verge of erupting from sheer class resentment. He even vomits angrily, in what must be the most shocking emetic sequence of fifties British cinema — it’s not that it’s explicitly depicted, it’s just what Baker is able to do with the power of acting alone. That man could puke for Wales.

With Baker out of the picture, genteel Donald Sinden, Denholm Elliot and John Stratton supply Hawkins’ support, and the film gets into its stride. When Elliot died, Dennis Potter appeared on TV to testify to his chum’s unique ability to suggest, by the merest contractions of the muscles around the jaw, the good impulses in a bad man struggling to get out, or the bad influences in a good man struggling to get out. He’s already doing it here!

The whole movie is about the psychological effects of war: living at close quarters in unpleasant conditions, fear of death, dealing with suffering and mutilation, and ultimately, being forced to make decisions that are hard to live with. The kind of material dealt with would have been impossible to show in wartime, I think. IN WHICH WE SERVE features civilian casualties and isn’t all upbeat flag-waving, but it’s hard to believe they could have gotten away with a captain sacrificing men in the water in order to depth-charge an enemy sub — that might not be there.

The sequence is boldly conceived and brilliantly cut. Realizing he needed a shot of the dead bodies drifting away from the ship, a shot he’d neglected to take, Frend reversed a shot in which the bodies are coming closer. So the emotional climax of the scene features seagulls whirling in the air tail-feathers-first, something nobody ever notices since the attention is riveted upon the centre of dramatic interest.

Hawkins is excellent, of course, in the role that made him. He’d been bumming around the British film industry since the early thirties, appearing in a talkie version of THE LODGER where his great jack-o-lantern head bobbles about atop scrawny scarecrow limbs, made the more ghastly by pallid greasepaint and dark lipstick. Hawkins the Death-Clown. Putting on a bit of weight was essential to balance off that vast cranium — once he turned into a toby jug he was somehow acceptable, and made a fine character player for Reed, Powell, Gilliatt, Dickinson, Mackendrick. But he wasn’t usually asked to carry so much of the show as he is here.

Frend helps his actors along with some striking uses of sound, no doubt indicated in Eric Ambler’s script. As dead men float on the waves, we hear their memories, as if their brains, winding down to a long sleep, were replaying a few stuck phrases… and when Hawkins gets his new command, he momentarily hears screams coming from the speaking tube, a stray memory of the sinking of his last ship. I think these unusual effects come jointly from Ambler’s background as a novelist and Frend’s as editor, pushing the emotional dial up to a near-unbearable pitch by sheer brilliance of technique.